public safety

Hike seen in gun permits

la prensa

destruction: Over the last four years, police have stepped up efforts to rid the streets of illegal firearms. Nearly 6,200 unlicensed guns were seized between Feb. 2004 and May 2008. 1119261

So far this year, authorities have received 2,456 applications for handgun carry permits and 3,679 for permit renewals and transfers.

Those figures from the Directorate of Judicial Investigation may be similar to those recorded in 2007, but they are 233 percent higher than those from four years ago, when the police issued just 737 new firearm permits.

In fact, since Martín Torrijos took office in 2004, the number of gun permit applications has spiked, seeming to parallel the steady rise in crime, which was up 35.5 percent during the first three years of the administration.

Despite the data kept on gun permit procedures, questions remain on the accuracy they offer about exactly how many people actually possess firearms. And authorities admit that those questions don’t have easy answers.

Conservative estimates from the Institute of Criminalistics, Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, home to the country’s premier ballistics experts, indicate that there are about 90,000 firearms officially registered in the country.

However, on-leave Minister of Government and Justice Daniel Delgado Diamante claimed in a statement earlier this year that another 140,000 weapons of unknown status remain in the hands of civilians throughout the country.

In the opinion of the director of the Institute of Criminology of the University of Panama, Aida Selles de Palacios, “violence begets violence,” and where violent crime involves firearms, the results are even more disconcerting.

Some 379 people were killed in gun homicides between January and August of this year, according to reports from the Department of Integrated System of Criminal Statistics at the Ministry of Government and Justice.

And as those numbers climb, so does the frequency of instances where firearms are used in self-defense and for vigilante justice, actions once limited to countries such as Mexico and Colombia, where civilians have lost faith in the government’s ability to combat crime.

The most recent example of this occurred in San Miguelito in October, when the owner of a Los Andes business frequently targeted by robbers killed two would-be thieves with a gun he had purchased to defend his employees.

As proof of a growing awareness of the problem, authorities have been increasingly active in rounding up illegal firearms in recent years, seizing nearly 6,200 weapons between Feb. 2004 and May 2008, according to police sources.

Moreover, the Executive Branch has been pushing the National Assembly to adopt a law aimed at beefing up the regulations surrounding the importation, sale and possession of firearms across the country.

Tomás García Tovar, director of Public Security Affairs at the Ministry of Government and Justice, explained that a central national weapon registry was recently created, and the process of acquiring a license for carrying a gun now includes more steps, such as demonstrating “objective justification” for the purchase of a firearm, a certificate of physical and mental health from the Ministry of Health and a certificate of participation in a seminar on the responsible handling of weapons.